Journal of the History of Philosophy

The General Account of Pleasure in Plato's Philebus THOMAS M. TUOZZO 1. INTRODUCTION DOES PLATO IN THE Philebus present a single general account of pleasure, applicable to all of the kinds of pleasure he discusses in that dialogue? Gosling and Taylor think not;' Dorothea Frede has recently reasserted a version of the contrary, traditional view. 2 The traditional view, I shall argue in this essay, is correct: the Philebus does contain a general account of pleasure applicable to all pleasures. Nonetheless, Gosling and Taylor have pointed to a real difficulty with the traditional view, a difficulty that has never been adequately addressed . To show how it can be overcome will involve showing that Plato's account of pleasure, and his analyses of other phenomena of moral psychology in the Philebus, are more complex and subtle than has often been realized. Gosling and Taylor offer two considerations in support of their view: (1) Socrates insists against Protarchus that different pleasures can be "most opposite " to each other, which suggests that no single account can apply to them all,s and (2) Socrates does not indicate how the most likely candidate for a general account of pleasure, one involving the restoration of a natural har- ,j. c. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greekson Pleasure (Oxford, 1982), 14o: "It seems clear that in the Philebus Plato has no general formula to encapsulate the nature of pleasure.... " So, too, C. Hampton, Pleasure, Knowledgeand Being: An Analysis ofPlato's "Philebus" (Albany, 199o), 73. A similar view is implied by H. Voigtl~inder,Die Lust und das Gute beiPlaton (Wfirzburg, 196o), 163 n. 992D . Frede, "Disintegration and Restoration: Pleasure and Pain in the Philebus," in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. R. Kraut (Cambridge, ]992), 444: "Plato's definition of pleasure... is designed to cover all kinds of pleasure .... " Cf. also D. Frede, tr., Plato: Philebus (Indianapolis, 1993), xliii: "The definition of pleasure and pain as restoration and disintegration..." Important older representatives of the traditional view are F. Susemihl, Die genetische Entwicklung der Platonischen Philosophie (2 vols., 1885-186o; reprint, Osnabriick, 1967), 2:1-58 and J. Ferber, "Piatos Polemik gegen die Lusflehre," Zeitschriftfiir Philosophieund PhilosophischeKritik 148 (1912): 129--81. 3Gosling and Taylor, The Greekson Pleasure, 136, 14o. [495] 496 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER t996 mony, could possibly apply to two important types of pleasure he discusses: pleasures of anticipation and what we may call the "emotional" pleasures, such as those involved in malicious laughter.4 The first of these cannot be made to carry much weight. Socrates compares the differences among pleasures with those among colors and those among shapes; in eachof these cases the differing items are "one in kind [genei... hen]" while admitting "ten-thousand-fold differentiation," such that some of them are "most opposite to each other" ( 12e 7-13a2). Even in the Meno Socrates recognizes--indeed, insistswthat different shapes and colors may be "opposite to each other" (74d7), even as he presses Meno for definitions that apply to all shapes or colors, respectively.5 His insistence in the Philebus on the differences between types of pleasure does not imply, ~ nor even suggest, that looking for a single account of the genos of pleasure is a mistake.7 Gosling and Taylor's second reason for denying the existence of a generic account of pleasure in the Philebus is more serious, however. Socrates does not explicitly show how either pleasures of anticipation or emotional pleasures can be explained by a restoration-model of pleasure, s Nonetheless, I shall argue 4Gosling and Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure, 136. Gosling and Taylor are also skeptical of the applicabilityof such an account to the pure pleasures of sight and sound 038). In this, and in their skepticism about explaining pleasures of anticipation on the restorative model, Gosling and Taylor take up an Aristotelian criticism: "The pleasures of learning, and, among the sensuous pleasures, those of smell, and also many sounds and sights, and memories and hopes, do not involve pain. Of what will these be the coming into being? There has not been a lack of anything of which they could be the replenishment" (EN t 173b16...